After the war, these visits to the south alternated with long periods when Stalin barely left his Moscow dacha. Visits to his Kremlin office became increasingly rare, primarily due to his deteriorating health. He continued to suffer from stomach pain and intestinal disturbances, accompanied by fever, throat problems, colds, and influenza. His atherosclerosis was progressing.43 Despite scattered attempts to do so, he was by now simply incapable of changing his sedentary lifestyle. The copious fare served at his frequent late-night dinner gatherings was surely not good for him. According to Milovan Djilas, who visited Stalin’s dacha several times in the 1940s, “The selection of food and drink was huge, with an emphasis on meat dishes and hard liquor.”44 The leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, Matyas Rakosi, recalled the following:
The atmosphere at these dinners was free and easy; people told jokes—often even dirty ones—to the raucous laughter of everyone present. Once they tried to get me drunk, but wine doesn’t affect me, which earned me recognition and a bit of surprise from those in attendance. Our last dinner together was in the fall of 1952. When Stalin left the room at three in the morning, I commented to the Politburo members, “Stalin is already 73; aren’t such dinners, stretching so late into the night, bad for him?” His comrades assured me that Stalin knew his limits.45
Stalin brought up his age and the importance of cultivating a new generation of leaders with increasing frequency.46 Deep down, however, he must have hoped for the best. In November 1949, when the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha expressed the wish that Stalin would live to one hundred, the Soviet leader joked: “That’s not enough. Back home in Georgia we have old people still alive at 145.”47 As Stalin’s daughter Svetlana attested, “In later years he wanted to continue in good health and live longer.”48
In 1952, Stalin did not travel south. Even though he remained in Moscow, he visited his Kremlin office only fifty times, an average of less than once a week. On 21 December 1952, for his seventy-third birthday, his daughter Svetlana made her final visit to her father’s dacha. “I was worried at how badly he looked,” she recalled. “He must have felt his illness coming on. Maybe he was aware of some hypertension, for he’d suddenly given up smoking and was very pleased with himself.… He’d been smoking for fifty or sixty years.”49 By this time his atherosclerosis was well advanced. The autopsy performed two and a half months later showed that damage to the arteries had greatly impeded blood flow to the brain.50
To what extent was Stalin’s death hastened by a lack of professional care? It is widely believed that he did not see any doctors during the final months of his life due to arrests at government hospitals in connection with the Doctors’ Plot (see chapter 6 below). Svetlana Allilueva writes:
He was probably aware of an increase in his blood pressure, but he hadn’t any doctor to take care of him. Vinogradov [a renowned doctor who had treated Stalin], the only one he trusted, had been arrested and he wouldn’t let any other doctor near him.
Somewhere or other he got hold of some quack remedies, and he’d take some pills or pour a few drops of iodine into a glass of water. Moreover, he himself did a thing no doctor would ever have allowed: Two months after I last saw him and just twenty-four hours before his stroke he went to the bathhouse near the dacha and took a steam bath, as he’d been accustomed to doing ever since Siberia.51
Allilueva’s testimony has to be taken with a grain of salt. She rarely saw her father and knew little about his life. Her reminiscences offer a subjective view of events. No archival documents have been found to clarify whether Stalin was under the care of doctors during the final months of his life. Nothing has been written about the quality of his health care at that time. Perhaps no treatment in the world would have helped.
We are equally in the dark about another complex question: the effect Stalin’s ailments had on his decisions and actions. Without solid evidence, speculation on this subject remains just that. What we do know is that Miasnikov, one of the doctors summoned to his deathbed, believed that the extensive damage to Stalin’s cerebral arteries uncovered during his post mortem must have affected his character and behavior:
I believe that Stalin’s cruelty and suspiciousness, his fear of enemies and loss of the ability to assess people and events, his extreme obstinacy—all this was the result, to a certain extent, of atherosclerosis of the arteries in his brain (or rather, atherosclerosis exacerbated these traits). Basically, the state was being governed by a sick man.… Sclerosis of the blood vessels in the brain developed slowly, over the course of many years. Areas of cerebral softening that had originated much earlier were discovered in Stalin.52
These observations by a distinguished doctor are entirely consistent with the testimony of Stalin’s associates. Even the most devoted among them, Vyacheslav Molotov, admitted, “In my opinion, Stalin was not quite in possession of his faculties during his final years.”53 A historian, as well, would have no trouble coming up with “oddities” and inappropriate responses in Stalin’s political behavior. But historians are not doctors. While keeping their subjects’ possible ailments in mind, they try not to dwell on them.
5 STALIN AT WAR
The 22 June 1941 surprise attack came with plenty of warning. The previous evening Moscow’s military leadership received a report: a sergeant in the German army had crossed the border with the news that an invasion would begin the following morning.1 Stalin was immediately informed, and the military leaders and Politburo gathered in his office to decide how to respond. People’s Commissar for Defense Semen Timoshenko and Army Chief of Staff Georgy Zhukov, according to the latter’s memoirs, asked for a directive allowing them to bring troops to a state of combat readiness.2 Stalin was doubtfuclass="underline" “Could it be that the German generals sent us this defector to provoke a clash?” After hearing out his military chiefs, he concluded, “It would be premature to issue such an order. The matter might still be resolved peacefully. We should issue a brief order indicating that an invasion could start with provocative actions by German units. To avoid complicating matters, forces in border districts should not give in to any provocations.”3 The order reached troops shortly after midnight.